Background

BRIDGE is a European Commission initiative which unites Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe Smart Grid, Energy Storage, Islands, and Digitalisation Projects to create a structured view of cross-cutting issues which are encountered in the demonstration projects and may constitute an obstacle to innovation. The BRIDGE process fosters continuous knowledge sharing amongst projects thus allowing them to deliver conclusions and recommendations about the future exploitation of the project results, with a single voice, through four different Working Groups representing the main areas of interest:

  • Regulation
  • Business models
  • Data management
  • Consumer and citizen engagement

DOWEL’s role

DOWEL Innovation participates in BRIDGE on behalf of the EU-funded project LocalRES. In the year 2023-2024, DOWEL was active in two working groups: Karine Laffont-Eloire co-chaired the Action 2 of the WG Regulation, dedicated to energy sharing, while Athanase Vaféas led Task 3 in the WG Business models, focussing on the valorisation of data generated by BRIDGE projects solutions

Key Findings

Overall, 13 projects contributed to the activities of Action 2 on energy sharing. This included the identification of barriers to energy sharing and peer to peer trading. While some barriers are of regulatory nature, others are financial, technical or social.  The regulatory framework was deemed as overly complex by some participating projects. The legislative texts adopted at Member State level to transpose the EU directives were considered as too restrictive and not fully aligned with the EU definitions. Additionally, energy sharing and P2P trading focus on electricity, thereby creating silos and missing the opportunity to unlock the potential of sector integration.

As regards good practices, projects mentioned:

  • Set up industrial alliances and collaboration with regulatory bodies,
  • Monitor legislative and regulatory developments at the national and European levels,
  • Install smart meters or intelligent monitoring devices (with consumers agreement) to access consumption data when the DSO cannot share them,
  • If there is a legislative blocker to creating an energy community: change the location of demonstration if a regulatory sandbox cannot be requested

Recommendations to address the main barriers, which build upon lessons learnt and good practices from the participating projects, were outlined and prioritised during two interactive workshops. Ten recommendations were finally produced. The projects participating in Action 2 continued working on these recommendations during summer 2024, to make them more actionable, i.e., each recommendation was broken down into a set of suggested actions. The results of this collective work will be integrated into the activities to be carried out by Action 2 from October 2024 to March 2025.

 

Link to full documents:

WG Regulation report: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/2c48a3e7-8cfc-11ef-a130-01aa75ed71a1/language-en

WG Business models report: https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/b72ec593-8aa4-11ef-a67d-01aa75ed71a1/language-en